The UK government has announced that it is to look again at plans to block websites that infringe copyright.

Illegal downloads are believed to cost the creative industries £400m a year

The controversial measures formed part of its crackdown on net pirates, outlined in the Digital Economy Act (DEA).

The decision to review it follows a raft of complaints about the workablility of the legislation.

Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has now asked Ofcom to consider the viability of blocking certain websites.

Right tools

"I have no problem with the principle of blocking access to websites used exclusively for facilitating illegal downloading of content," said Mr Hunt.

"But it is not clear whether the site blocking provisions in the Act could work in practice so I have asked Ofcom to address this question," he added.

The rethink was prompted by ideas submitted to the Your Freedom website, which asked members of the public to nominate laws and regulations they would like to see abolished.

"When we launched Your Freedom, I promised that the ideas submitted would be given proper consideration.... we have listened to the views expressed," said deputy prime minister Nick Clegg.

"The government will look at whether we have the right tools for the job in addressing the problem of online copyright infringement," he added.

It is not clear how many people complained about the DEA on Your Freedom, but a spokesman for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said it was "one of the most commented on" pieces of legislation.

Among the questions for Ofcom to consider are:
Is it possible for access to the site to be blocked by internet service providers?
How robust would such a block be?
Can specific parts of the site be blocked?
What would it cost ISPs to implement such blocks?

The Open Rights Group, which has long campaigned against the DEA, welcomed Ofcom's review.

"It's encouraging that the government is listening to people's genuine concerns about the Digital Economy Act.

The web blocking provisions are a real mistake - they would stifle freedom of expression, for unproven benefit, whilst being extremely costly and difficult to manage," said Peter Bradwell, an ORG campaigner.

Judicial review

The government's attempts to crack down on illegal file-sharing have courted much controversy.

Ofcom is already planning the first stage of the campaign, which will see letters sent to those identified as illegal file-sharers.

The DEA is subject to a judicial review, which will look at whether the act is legal and justifiable.

The review, granted to ISPs BT and TalkTalk, will take place in March.

Opponents claim that the legislation was rushed through parliament without proper debate and that the methods that would be used to identify net pirates are flawed and unfair.

In a recent court case brought against 27 alleged illegal file-sharers, it was argued that the IP address of a computer, the numerical code that identifies the connection, cannot be used as evidence because it fails to identify the individual responsible.

The judge is due to rule on the case imminently.

The government needs secondary legislation before it can procced with any plans to block websites. Ofcom is due to report back in the spring.

A prestigious economics think-tank of the Japanese Government has published a study which concludes that online piracy of anime shows actually increases sales of DVDs. The conclusion stands in sharp contrast with the entertainment industry’s claims that ‘illicit’ downloading is leading to billions of dollars in losses worldwide. It also puts the increased anti-piracy efforts of the anime industry in doubt.

The Japanese Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) has published an elaborate study that examined the effect of piracy on sales and rentals of Japanese anime DVDs. The results are quite remarkable.

While the music and movie industry often make outrageous claims about the disastrous effect of piracy on their respective industries, researchers are still divided. Some researchers claim a considerable loss due to unauthorized sharing, while others have found that the overall effect of piracy is a positive one.

RIETI’s study on the effects of piracy on the sales of anime DVDs in Japan falls in the latter category.

In their paper the researchers examine the effects of YouTube and the popular P2P-network Winny on DVD sales and rentals of Japanese anime episodes.

“Estimated equations of 105 anime episodes show that (1) YouTube viewing does not negatively affect DVD rentals, and it appears to help raise DVD sales; and (2) although Winny file sharing negatively affects DVD rentals, it does not affect DVD sales,” the researchers conclude.

“YouTube’s effect of boosting DVD sales can be seen after the TV’s broadcasting of the series has concluded, which suggests that not just a few people learned about the program via a YouTube viewing. In other words YouTube can be interpreted as a promotion tool for DVD sales,” it adds.

The results of the Japanese research confirm that piracy does not always have to be associated with a decrease in sales. Similar effects have been observed for music piracy and book piracy as well.

One point of critique based on the main conclusions of the study, is that the observed relation only appears to be correlational. This may mean that the results could in part be influenced by significant third variables such as promotion and overall popularity. Since the report is only available in Japanese we were unable to confirm whether this was taken into account.

The results of the study come at an interesting time. For years anime distributors where considered quite lenient towards piracy, but last week the American anime distributor Funimation announced lawsuits against 1337 alleged BitTorrent downloaders.

Although it’s not expected that one study will change the tune of the copyright holders who are currently pursing alleged pirated in court, the study does confirm that the availability of unauthorized streams and downloads do not necessarily harm sales. Quite the opposite. The challenge for the content producers is to find the sweet spot that will benefit them, and consumers.

The movie industry certainly had something to celebrate when it announced 2010′s box office revenues. For the first time in history box office grosses worldwide have surpassed the magic $30 billion mark and revenues are up 8 percent compared to 2009. But it’s not all positive news. Despite their achievements, in a surreal plot twist the MPAA is still calling for tougher legislation and strict enforcement to deal with the ever-looming piracy ghost.

The MPAA has made it very clear that hundreds of thousands of jobs are under threat and the economy is losing billions due to piracy. Illegal downloads, they say, are slowly killing their creative industry.

However, in a time where nearly every MPAA press release deals with piracy concerns, box office revenues are booming worldwide. The MPAA has just announced that in 2010 yet another record was broken at the box office. In the US and Canada last year’s record of $10.6 billion was equalled, while worldwide grosses swelled to a massive $31.8 billion.

“It was a strong year at the movies in 2010. Despite a weak economy, shifting business models, and the ongoing impact of digital theft, we had another record year at the global box office driven by growth outside the U.S. and Canada,” MPAA President Bob Pisano said, commenting on the record-breaking revenues worldwide.

“The continued theft of movies online will have a sustained adverse impact on movie attendance in the coming years,” Pisano added somewhat predictably. “It’s impossible to compete with free.”

Oh really? That last statement, although catchy, makes absolutely no sense in this context.

Does the MPAA chief truly believe that a shaky camcorded version of a movie is somehow depriving movie theaters of visitors? Are there millions of people who prefer watching a low quality camcorded version of a movie over a theater visit simply because they can save a few bucks?

Pisano is comparing apples and oranges here – and he and his buddies have nearly 32 billion reasons in their back pocket to prove it.

It would be the same as saying that a fan of band X won’t go to a concert because he can download a bootleg copy on the Internet instead. Movie piracy is hardly a threat (or competition) to movie theater attendances. If anything holds people back from spending a few dollars on a movie it’s probably the insane security measures that have been implemented in recent years.

Still, the MPAA is confident that piracy is affecting box office revenues, so it will therefore continue to push for new legislation and enforcement tools.

“We will continue to work with our industry partners to fight for common sense ways, through legislative, enforcement and legal avenues, to vigilantly protect the creativity at the heart of our industry from theft,” Pisano says.

One of the focuses of the MPAA has been to reduce camcording in movie theaters, but one has to question whether the investments that are made in this area are worth it. Do movie theater employees really have to be equipped with night vision goggles? Are metal detectors, emotion recognition and advanced audio watermarks really needed to pinpoint pirates?

It is almost as if the MPAA and other anti-piracy outfits continue this “piracy theater” just to guarantee and justify their jobs and those of their comrades. Make no mistake, anti-piracy is big business. There are dozens of anti-piracy outfits, copyright protection vendors and lobby groups that each earn millions of dollars merely because of this supposed piracy threat.

The Federal Court of Australia has dismissed a case (read the ruling) from the movie industry which argued that ISPs must take action against file-swappers, based on allegations of infringement from copyright holders. The case against ISP iiNet was an appeal of the original judgment in the matter, which also went against rightsholders.
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Tells Indie Game Summit to treat pirates as potential customers: “Make a game last longer than a week.”

Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson told the closing session at GDC’s Indie Games Summit yesterday that the notion of piracy as theft is false.

“Piracy is not theft,” he said. Referencing the most common anti-piracy argument, he said: “If you steal a car, the original is lost. If you copy a game, there are simply more of them in the world.”

“There is no such thing as a ‘lost sale’,” he said, debunking another popular myth. “Is a bad review a lost sale? What about a missed ship date?”

Noting that most people want to do what is far and right, he suggests developers see pirates not as inherently evil, but as potential customers. He echoes a familiar theme for this year’s GDC, one that was mentioned on Monday by Rovio, countering Nintendo’s assertion that cheap, disposable games give the impression that all games should be cheap and disposable: the notion of games as services.

Like Rovio’s Angry Birds, Notch’s Minecraft is constantly updated. The game was put on sale in its alpha state, and at one point sold 350,000 copies in a single day; when the game entered beta and he raised the price by 50 per cent, sales doubled. “Treat game development as a service,” he says. “Make a game last longer than a week. You can’t pirate an online account.”

In anticipation of the Academy Awards ceremony last week, Belarusian TV viewers were treated to some previous Oscar-awarded movies. One of the films that Belarus’ National State Television decided to air was last year’s best picture The Hurt Locker. However, the channel managers apparently didn’t go through all the proper licensing channels, electing to show a copy that had been downloaded from the BitTorrent site Interfilm.ru instead.

Belarus TV viewers who saw The Hurt Locker on TV last Sunday noticed something odd. In the middle of all the action, near the end of the movie, a female voice-over interrupted with the following announcement:

“This release is created exclusively for interfilm.ru.”

Although these words may not have rung a bell with all viewers, those who use BitTorrent know Interfilm.ru as a prominent BitTorrent tracker. The site was raided in 2009 after the MPAA applied pressure on the Russian authorities, and it is now at the center of copyright infringement claim which runs to a staggering $1.25 billion.

It is not uncommon for this voice-over message to appear in movie torrents uploaded to Interfilm, but it is quite unusual for National State Television to broadcast them.

The message was first picked up by a Belarusian blogger who posted it on his website, from where it spread to several major news outlets including Lenta.ru. National State Television, who allegedly aired the pirated copy of The Hurt Locker, have yet to respond to the mishap.

It is of course painful that this slip-up should happen during the Academy Award ceremony, and that it references the first ever BitTorrent site to be raided in Russia. The Hurt Locker makers, who sued thousands of BitTorrent users in the United States last year, will obviously be upset at this blatant act of copyright infringement.

A DVD copy of The Hurt Locker leaked online in January 2009, several months before the official release. In the months that followed pirated copies were downloaded by millions of people, and now it also has the dubious honor of being the first ‘torrented’ movie to appear on national television.

Update: A spokeswoman for Belarus’ National State television said that proper licenses for the film were acquired through the Russian company GALA Media. The phrase mentioning Interfilm.ru could be a “technical error”, she noted.

Sony has been given permission to obtain details of people who downloaded files needed to hack the PlayStation 3.

Sony has said it can identify PS3 users running hacked consoles

A judge in San Francisco granted the electronics giant a subpoena that would allow it to see a list of IP addresses.

The software, used to crack the PS3's operating system, was posted on the website of George Hotz, who is also known as Geohot.

Sony is suing Mr Hotz, claiming his hacks breach copyright laws, and could allow users to play pirated games.

Court documents, obtained by Wired magazine, show that the company successfully petitioned to obtain IP addresses from the web-hosting company Bluehost.

The details could be used to trace the real-world geographical locations of users who accessed George Hotz's website, Geohot.com.

However, it may not be Sony's intention to take legal action against those found to have downloaded the software crack.

Illicit conduct

Sources with knowledge of the case said there was unlikely to be the appetite for a prolonged and expensive series of legal challenges.

Rather, the subpoena document suggests that Sony wants to discover the number and location of the downloaders in order to establish jurisdiction in its case against Mr Hotz.

"SCEA [Sony Computer Entertainment America] needs to determine how rampant the access to and use of these circumvention devices has been in California in order to rebut Mr Hotz's suggestion that his illicit conduct was not aimed at the forum state," the document reads.

The subpoena also grants Sony the right to access information relating to the case from Twitter, Google Blogspot and YouTube.

Restraining order

The company had previously been granted a restraining order against Mr Hotz, banning him from revealing techniques to manipulate the PlayStation 3's operating system.

The 21-year-old, along with a number of other individuals, is charged with violating several copyright-related laws, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

He is also accused of offences under the United States' Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Mr Hotz denies that he set out to help software pirates, claiming instead that he was championing the 'home brew' community - users who write their own software for the PS3.

Sony has said it is now able to remotely identify users who are running hacked PlayStation 3 consoles and that it will ban persistent offenders from using its online services.